Conjunctions

All this talk from the right-wing noise machine about how Big Government is going to enslave us all and rot our livers is really depressing me.  It is just so inane, so religious like.  I think what upsets me about the libertarianesque fear of government is that, like most of the status-quo sadly, it draws an hierarchical opposition between the government and the people.  A rather obvious deconstruction of this opposition can perhaps serve to clear away some fog:

As blogger Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest is fond of reminding us, Government = “We The People”.  I would say this is true not only in the US where it is enshrined in their constitution, but everywhere.  No government can persist against the will of the people, and governments fear nothing more than their own citizens. The origins of all government lie in the instincts of the people for co-operation and community. The issue is not how big or small government is – after all, you cannot get bigger or smaller than the people, but how capable our government is in acting in the interests of the people rather than the interests of the powerful.

I admit this opens up a whole new can of worms.  Still, abolishing government is essentially as impossible as abolishing the people.  Bear in mind however that people (and government) can be changed, diversified, evolved, engaged, reformed, renovated, and even transformed, revolutionized or liberated.